


The Man with the Twisted Lip

by ArabellaStrange



Series: Ode to Broken Things [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: First Time, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, canon references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-23 01:54:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 15,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/920607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArabellaStrange/pseuds/ArabellaStrange
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's something wrong with Sherlock's shoe. John can't seem to let it go.</p><p>(Adapted from the original Conan Doyle story of the same title. Series to be continued...)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To borrow from J.S. Mill: for those many, many readers 'to whom nothing which I am about to say will be new,' please, 'excuse me, if on a subject which [...] has been so often discussed, I venture on one discussion more.'

_‘Let us take everything at once, clocks,_  
 _plates, cups carved by the cold,_  
 _in a sack and carry_  
 _to the sea our treasures:_  
 _let sink our possessions_  
 _in a single alarming breaker,_  
 _sounding like a river_  
 _that which is broken_  
 _and reconstructed by the sea_  
 _with its long labouring tides_  
 _so many useless things_  
 _which nobody broke_  
 _but which got broken anyway.’_

\--Pablo Neruda

  


Ch. 1

As Sherlock stopped and peered around the corner of Swandam Street, John took a second to catch his breath. His back hit the bricks, his shoulder brushing the dark wool of the detective’s coat, while he actively tried to stop himself thinking about where his feet were currently planted.

‘Couldn’t have picked a _dry_ spot to use for a vantage point,’ John muttered through his teeth. 

Grimacing in preparation, he lifted his right shoe experimentally. The resulting wet _squelch_ might have been comic – a slimy tendril of lettuce was dangling from his sole, dripping god knew what onto a square of gauze that had browned with rainwater and what he viscerally hoped was not old blood – had it not also reeked. He replaced his shoe. ‘Great.’

Sherlock said nothing in reply, but leaned into the wall beside John with a distant yet alert look. ‘He’s in there, I’m sure,’ Sherlock confirmed to himself. He settled, his elbow knocking gently against John’s in a way the latter still found thrilling. Oh, he had missed _cases_.

John wasn’t clear on whether they were hunting the client’s almost certainly dead husband (Sherlock hadn’t said as much but the stern, indignant look he’d worn since Mrs St Clair had first come to Baker Street gave John little hope) or his killer. Just as he opened his mouth to whisper this question, a flicker of… _what_? Annoyance? Pain? something John couldn’t read dashed across Sherlock’s face.

‘What?’ he asked, concerned.

‘Nothing,’ replied Sherlock instantly, but his weight shifted to his other foot; John thought unbidden of an angry crow he’d seen in the park ruffling its feathers haughtily as it landed on and then promptly took off from a wad of chewing gum. 

He smirked. ‘I’ll refrain from pointing out that it was your genius idea to stop next to the sewer monster's own skip.’

Sherlock glanced sidelong over John to the open bin, piled with overstuffed plastic bags that were doing nothing to contain their sickly-sweet odour. Flies hovered over the heap.

His nose wrinkled in exactly the same way, John recognised from the single baby picture he had ever seen of his friend, he had always done. (If Sherlock ever had a child, John was certain they would inherit this same endearing facial quirk along with the curls, insufferability, and IQ.)

‘Hmm,’ noted Sherlock succinctly.

‘My thoughts exactly.’

As if to reduce the extent of his poor planning, Sherlock turned and strode into the street they had just been surveilling, stepping into direct sunlight exactly as if he owned the place. Surprised, John snapped to attention and followed, deliberately scraping each sole on the pavement as he did so.

No. 113, John already knew, was a nondescript electronics shop, fitted in between a fairly dingy florist on its left and an indisputably dingy off-license on its right. As they approached it, Sherlock radiated his familiar brand of smooth invisibility, warding off wondering eyes with the sense that he both wasn’t there and that he might be there all the time. But something was off.

‘All right?’ John inquired, looking at the wet asphalt beneath their feet, his voice too low to be heard by the old man smoking in a doorframe as they walked past.

Sherlock hummed an indistinct reply, his right foot dragging for a moment behind his left. John frowned. Had he hurt his ankle? No, he was putting weight on it; and, John thought over their day so far (Kent this morning, leaving just before dawn, then a train and otherwise uneventful walk among London’s millions of early commuters and eager tourists), when could he have twisted it anyway?

Without stopping, Sherlock pushed open the grimy door, into the even grimier shop. 

‘Hey! Hey!’ shouted a short man coming from behind the counter with his arms outstretched as if to herd them back into the street. His thick Indian accent (Sherlock probably knew what town, never mind what province) was the same as on the interview tape Sherlock had purloined from Bradstreet yesterday. ‘You cannot come in! No customers! We are closed!’

‘And you will remain closed for seven to fourteen years, Mr Ramani, unless you cooperate with us.’

John kept silent as the man swallowed, his arms wilting to his sides. 

‘What do you want?’ he demanded quietly, but not – John noted – fearfully. Then again, if Sherlock’s details on the drug den Mr Ramani was apparently running from the basement were accurate, Sanjay Ramani had seen far worse than a consulting detective and his (armed) GP. 

‘To see the room where Neville St Clair’s clothes were left.’

Mr Ramani’s expression shuttered further as he glared. 

Feeling the strong-arm was perhaps a little too strong, John cut in, ‘We’re not the police. We don’t think you killed him.’

Ramani scoffed. ‘I do not know anything about this man,’ he told them.

‘Mr Ramani, we may not be the police, but our investigation is taking us to Bow Street, where I’m sure Inspector Bradstreet would be keen to hear about you weekend in Dundee with your employer. So let me advise you again, take us upstairs.’

The man blanched, and John considered whether he should be afraid for Ramani or himself. Wordlessly, the proprietor turned and walked toward the door marked ‘EMPLOYEES ONLY’, Sherlock one step behind. As they crossed the linoleum floor, John saw Sherlock wiggle his ankle again, before returning to his brisk gait with a _tsing!_ of his foot on tile.

‘Sher—’ John began, beneath the jangling of Ramani’s keys, but Sherlock cut him off quietly.

‘Not now!’

He ascended the thick concrete stairs, John taking his time after him as acrid fumes wafted up from the closed basement below. 

The second floor, behind a scuffed, once-white door, was little more than an unlit defunct storage room. It was filled with a maze of open and sealed cardboard boxes, tangled webs of indistinguishable black cables, dented aerials, precariously piled DVDs and computer games, and wire crates of what seemed to be (from the multilingual labels) lightbulbs. John wondered if Sherlock could read any of the languages on the packaging or if he simply knew the wattages and sockets by their box-shape. As if hearing this thought, Sherlock threw his a small, private smirk over his shoulder. John assumed this meant yes. The insufferable git.

Behind one tower of cheap steel shelves, a thin maroon curtain veiled the single window and the river beyond. Heart thudding, John placed a hand silently at his back, prepared to be jumped or shoved or blinded or any of the other possible attacks they had occasionally been treated to, just in the four months since resuming casework. Sherlock simply yanked the curtain aside. 

There was no one there.

John waited in the aisle of goods as Sherlock inspected first the pile of rags in a far corner basket, then the many-times stained floor, then finally the splatter (John’s jaw tensed at the sight) of copper-brown dots on and below the windowsill. The makeshift antechamber (John guessed, if the black binder on the horizontal crate constituted files and a desk, it was an ‘office’) seemed, to his eye, effectively empty. 

‘See?’ Mr Ramani said angrily, watching the proceedings. ‘There is nothing there. The police already took their pictures and left.’

Sherlock’s eyes swept the room, floor to ceiling, before he nodded noncommittally. A faint pull of muscle tugged his lips, and John had to hold back a sigh of relief. He had it.

‘The police also took Mr Boone to the station, Mr Ramani?’ Sherlock remarked, less menacing now.

He nodded. ‘That will show me to admit such a man to my shop again.’

‘I do hope he paid you for it,’ Sherlock agreed. Ramani looked up, guarded again, but Sherlock was on the move, ahead of them and back down the stairs before he could clarify. 

‘Thanks,’ John blurted out automatically, and left Mr Ramani standing confused in the shadows.

* * *

Out on the pavement, Sherlock was mid-swing in his usual combination of self-berating smugness. ‘Obvious,’ he scoffed, ‘honestly, John, I’m getting slow.’

_Tsnick, tsnick, tsnick._

John looked round to find the source of the scraping noise; halfway down the street, a young man was tugging gruffly on a metal barrier, though whether to open or close shop, John couldn’t tell.

Round the corner, Sherlock hailed and – as was his possibly magical tendency – approached the immediately answering cab. 

‘Bow Street police station,’ he barked, climbing in. 

‘Right-o,’ sighed the cabbie.

John waited a few moments as Swandam Street vanished behind them, before finally prompting, ‘So? Got it then? What’d they do with the body?’

Sherlock’s long, painterly fingers were tapping out something on his phone before slowing and slipping the mobile back into his coat. 

‘Yes,’ was all he returned.

John’s stomach gave a leap of victory despite this laconic reply, then felt a stab of guilt. Mrs St Clair’s face, proud and hopeful and sure of her husband’s survival, winked into his memory.

_‘He’s a brilliant man,’ she had told John, hands cupped around her undrunk tea in her small kitchen. ‘We’ve been…’ She swallowed, then smiled sadly at him. ‘We had been pretty skint the past few years, after I got the sack and Lily, our littlest, got ill. But it had really started to pay off after his promotion. And Neville… he’s really doing something, Dr Watson. Journalism isn’t just tabloids and movie reviews and the weather report to him, it’s… it’s real. My friends didn’t even like him because he seemed like he was ignoring us or putting his job first but…’ She searched his face, and John felt inexplicably guilty._

_‘It’s important,’ he finished._

_‘Yes!’ Her smiled crumpled and she blinked several times, looking away. ‘I always understood. I still do.’_

_Her cherry-brown hair fell loose from behind her ear and she took a shaky breath._

_‘I love him,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t know what I’d do…’_

_John looked away, staring instead at the framed portrait of the family at a park, all four faces covered in ice cream, the picture slightly obscured by the unmoved long coat on the hook by the door._

_‘I understand.’_

The cab lurched to a stop, bringing John back from his reverie. If Sherlock had noticed John’s mental wander, he said nothing.

As usual, Sherlock bolted almost before they had fully braked; as usual, John thumbed the requisite notes from his wallet, grunted some farewell, and followed. The door slammed shut, and he started. Watching the cab pull away, he had the sinking feeling that he had left something on the seat, or, a dreamier sensation, that he’d been missing something fundamental – his watch, perhaps, or his shirt – all day, and that Sherlock and Mr Ramani and the cabbie had all been too distracted or too kind to say anything. 

‘John?’ came Sherlock’s voice, and John saw with some surprise that he was holding the station door expectantly.

‘Yeah,’ he replied, shaking himself, but not feeling any easier.

A minute later they were crossing the main hall of Bow Street, Sherlock yammering already to Inspector Bradstreet, who was – to his credit – nodding in apparent approval.

‘Haven’t gotten round to questioning him yet, mind,’ the Inspector was saying, and John, in another in a series of dim realisations, looked up at a clock. It was twenty to nine.

Bradstreet led them to the wide main staircase and down toward the holding cells. As he descended the first step, Sherlock stopped, leaned back, and pushed a finger between his heel and the leather of his lace-ups. John was there in an instant, there to balance Sherlock or prevent him tripping down the stairs. ‘What’s wrong with your shoe?’

With a pinched look, Sherlock peered condescendingly through his fringe at John. Bradstreet stopped mid-sentence several steps below.

‘I’m _fine_ , John, stop _hovering_ ,’ Sherlock drawled disdainfully, with such a sneer in his voice that John couldn’t repress a wince. His good humour with this day – or whatever remained of it – evaporated. 

Bradstreet waited another moment, looking between them, unsure. Sherlock said nothing but pushed past, so quickly the motion-sensing lights were still flickering as he marched through the doors. The inspector looked uncomfortably at John. ‘Everything all right there, Doctor Watson?’ he ventured in an undertone.

‘How should I know,’ John shrugged. Even to his own ears it sounded petulant.

Thankfully, Bradstreet let it drop, and they carried on after Sherlock in silence.

‘… and a bucket of very warm water – not boiling, yes, _very warm_.’ A young constable receiving these instructions gawped queasily over Sherlock’s shoulder, plainly hoping Bradstreet would countermand this no doubt joking orders.

Sherlock huffed impatiently and crowded further into the constable’s vision. ‘Water,’ he enunciated, ‘towel, _now_ ; honestly, Bradstreet, it’s no wonder so many crimes happen before midday if this is the state of the thinking policeman before his second cup of coffee.’

The inspector, a bulky, slightly rotund officer who reminded John of a particularly generous army cook who had once pulverised him in a drunken wrestling match, judiciously chose to ignore Sherlock. ‘Constable, if y’please, get us whatever our friend Mr Holmes requires.’

Visibly relieved to return to the proper chain of command, the spotty young man nodded once and weaved between them in the direction of the mess.

Once again Bradstreet dropped his voice. ‘And what, in the name of heaven, do you have my constable fetching a bird bath for?’

‘Not a bird,’ preened Sherlock dramatically. ‘A rabbit.’

The inspector pursed his lips, unconvinced.

Sherlock swivelled, striding down the narrow tiled corridor to stand definitively before the last and only shut door. 

‘Hugh Boone,’ Bradstreet suggested blankly, his finger worrying his strawberry-blond moustache. ‘I agree, he’s not a pretty bugger, but I don’t think that a wee shower would be quite so useful as an interview.’

‘We’ll see.’

The constable returned, huffing slightly, staggering as he lugged a sick-bucket that sloshed water over both sides with each step. Behind him emerged a second young officer, a plain-clothes sergeant John vaguely remembered as Paris or Priya or Paula. She brought forth a neatly folded greying towel.

‘No rubber duckies, I’m afraid,’ she chimed brightly, and John caught her eye in amusement. Sherlock grabbed the towel and turned to the red plastic bucket where the constable had plopped it heavily. He looked like a man on his way to an Aston Martin car wash.

‘He’s asleep!’ the young man, Jacobs, yelped in surprise.

‘Not if you continue shouting, constable,’ Sherlock retorted pompously. 

John couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘Sherlock, even if Hugh Boone did kill Mrs St Clair’s husband, I’m pretty sure he didn’t do it by _ponging_ him to death.’ 

He watched Sherlock roll up his sleeves with geometric exactitude, then crouch to submerge the cloth in the steaming bucket. His hands plunged into the water and reappeared, pink and slippery and twitchy from the stinging heat, and John thought that Jacobs might have been foolish enough to bring boiling water after all. 

Sherlock met John’s eyes briefly, but John looked away. His frustration resurfaced anew, gripping his neck like a physical hold. Sherlock’s sneer, and now these theatrics. This magic trick was an indulgence, at best, while back in Kent, Mrs St Clair sat wondering if today was the day she would have to identify her husband’s lifeless body. Whatever Sherlock had planned, John was tired of it; they needed to find Neville, or his body, and soon.

With his customary stern frown of poorly masked excitement, Sherlock stood. The towel dripped a soft tattoo into the carpet at his feet.

‘Let’s see him.’

With a drenched, reddened hand he deftly pushed the cell-door open, and stepped in. Almost noiselessly, he leaned over the small man who was currently curled on the cot, asleep. All four spectators shuffled in close, Bradstreet nearly blocking the view of his curious and now technically superfluous juniors. John crossed his arms and waited.

The sleeping man was, he had to admit, filthy. The knitted cap of Mr Hugh Boone, acclaimed itinerant spoken-word poet of the City, might once have been brown, or blue, or even orange, but appeared to have mouldered into crusty flakes above the man’s ears; the distinct smells of sweat, bitter smoke, and the muddy fishy tell-tale whiff of the Thames combined with the drunk tank’s almost tangible stench of vomit, alcohol, and piss. His no doubt stinking breath rattled in phlegmatic wheezes through his famous facial atrocity: his mangled lip. John cringed involuntarily. The straining, discoloured skin, if it had ever been stitched where it was cut, had healed poorly, a violent gash travelling up from Boone’s mouth to mottled forehead and (beneath his hat) possibly upwards to his cranium. He was lucky the site hadn’t become infected.

All this brought a vivid, gruesome reminder of the reality of case before them. John looked again at Sherlock, who, he found, was watching him with something like sadness.

‘From my hat,’ Sherlock told him, in a quick and quiet parody of a ring-master, ‘our rabbit.’

Suddenly he swooped down, yanked the cap off Boone, and pressed the hot towel to his face.

The homeless man jerked into waking and yelled, attempting, disorientated, to escape the sharp sting of the impromptu wash on his open cut. Sherlock dug his fingers in sharply at the scalp.

‘No!’ Boone roared. ‘No! GET OFF! GET THE FUCKING HELL OFF ME, YOU PSYCHO!’ His eyes, wild as he teetered back toward the wall, shot with panic. ‘SOMEONE!’

Through the ear-splitting din, with a thick, painful scrape of skin, hair, and gummy adhesive, Sherlock ruthlessly peeled away the towel and – John, unthinking, stepped forward to stop him, but he was too late, too shocked – Boone’s face with it.

‘May I present,’ said Sherlock with furious triumph, ‘Mr Neville St Clair.’

Everyone blinked.

The man’s hand splayed across his raw, blistered cheek, but even through his fingers they could see the disfiguring gash was gone.

‘Whoa,’ whispered the sergeant. The shouts from a moment before were still ringing in John’s ears.

Sherlock separated the (apparently) prosthetic graft from the towel and, putting the false mask on the cot with a toss, offered the now grimy cloth to the seated man. With a hooded look, St Clair eyed Sherlock, then took it.

‘How’d you see find me out?’ Of course, the gruff sleepy rumble held none of the harshness of a moment earlier, now rolling with a higher Edinburgh lilt. St Clair moved his mouth minimally, tongue following his question to probe tenderly at the freely bleeding cut where, John now understood, the plastic had been biting into his real lip. John’s own lip twisted in revulsion.

‘The binder at Ramani’s,’ Sherlock replied tersely. ‘He was not happy with you.’ St Clair nodded. ‘Though, in this matter at least, he was perfectly innocent.’

‘Er… well…’ Bradstreet cleared his throat. John, still stunned, saw his own sense of bewilderment splashed across the inspector’s face. ‘I… suppose we should take you in for questioning.’

‘For what crime?’ Sherlock reminded him, and John felt almost unaccountably like he was going to be sick. He swallowed instead.

All three Bow Street representatives exchanged whispered musings on protocol, but Sherlock merely watched the exhausted, sagging man to his left.

‘Money,’ he spat. ‘How terribly _dull_.’

John couldn’t breathe; he wasn’t sure he could stay in this room with the farcically bumbling police officers and Sherlock, rapidly deflating with boredom. He turned, moving the sergeant and constable aside possibly only with his thunderous expression, and started for the exit.

‘John?’ echoed Sherlock’s voice, ricocheting in the cell. 

He took three breaths in the miraculously empty corridor, then went back to the doorway where the others had backed away to let him through.

Sherlock’s utterly confused look met his. With only the tightest, most tenuous hold on his fury, John stared at St Clair. 

‘You should have trusted your wife.’

Thankfully, this time when he left, no one stopped him.

…


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Sherlock saw that John was hurt; he wanted – it was, statistically speaking, his most frequent and constant wish – John not to be hurt. He simply was not sure how to effect the desired outcome._

Panic sank coldly into Sherlock’s chest as he watched John, seething, leave the cell. John was distressed, clearly; furious and, less understandably, hurt, by Neville St Clair’s otherwise uninteresting prestidigitation. He saw that John was hurt; he wanted – it was, statistically speaking, his most frequent and constant wish – John not to be hurt. He simply was not sure how to effect the desired outcome.

Pulse elevated with frantic confusion, Sherlock took an automatic step to follow him, before freezing with the thought that John was distressed _by him_.

So he stayed, hating Neville St Clair for wedging into what he had been working tirelessly for four months (and before that, two years, and before that, a lifetime) to build between them. 

‘Did you decide to start begging before or after you lost your job, Mr St Clair?’ he fumed. He felt, despite his recent humid resurrection of the suspect, unreasonably cold.

‘I was working on a story on out-of-work veterans,’ St Clair explained, a little anxiously, apparently aware that he had erred in separating Sherlock from his single tether to civility. ‘Ironic, really.’

‘Isn’t it just,’ Sherlock spat, turning with a scratching whisper of his shoes on the hideously bleached-and-tarnished floor. ‘Bradstreet, arrest this _man_ ’ – he left no doubt in his voice about his generous application of this title to such a creature – ‘for aggravated trespassing –’

‘What!’ interjected St Clair, but Sherlock raised his voice and continued venomously, ‘–for disrupting the immigration debates in the House of Commons in June.’

St Clair seemed to prune with fear, shrivelling into himself and looking, with his wet hair, raw cheek, bleeding lip, and nauseating vagrant attire, every inch as despicable as Sherlock found him.

All three police officers, and honestly had they _nothing_ better to do, were watching Sherlock disbelievingly. At last, Bradstreet inquired seriously, ‘Would you care to explain, sir?’ 

‘It was – surely you heard that I – that is, that _Hugh Boone_ was a people’s favourite, something of a homeless, home-grown V.’ (Sherlock neither understood nor cared to know what the significance of that specific letter had to do with anything, though he heard the faint huffs of recognition from the younger two officers.) ‘Spoken-word poetry protesting was my particular gift, you see, and people would often shout suggestions to me – Hyde Park Corner, or Trafalgar Square, sometimes – and I’d… recite their grievances –’

This much Sherlock already knew; and, in any event, if he was unfamiliar with his popular culture references, he was absolutely uninterested in the stultifying matter of St Clair’s _politics_ , above all things. 

He spared himself any more monologuing. ‘For your own profit, and at the expense of the nation’s industry, to the tune of three hours and countless pounds while Scotland Yard and Parliamentary police were called in to locate the more disorderly of your “aggrieved” poetic enthusiasts and remove them from where they had trespassed into the Members' Lobby.’ He ignored the nagging itch along his spine, knowing how John would have balked at the irony of _Sherlock_ defending ‘national industry’, and how much teasing he would have been in for on the cab ride home; the absence of the sound grated worse than St Clair’s shouting.

Bradstreet looked commandingly at the accused, his solemn anticipation of the murder case giving way to his dogged adherence to procedure. ‘I think you’d better come upstairs to the interrogation room, sir, while we get this whole affair cleared up.’

Sherlock heard his exit cue in this performance piece. He had solved his client’s case, at any rate, and wanted to wash his hands, in every possible sense, of it. 

‘Please,’ St Clair begged, and Sherlock looked up from his balled fists to see Neville standing between the constable and sergeant, their grips bracketing him as surely as handcuffs. ‘Don’t tell – let me tell Grace, about everything – I just…’ He looked, for the first time, ashamed. ‘I don’t want the children to know what I… to see me…’ He gulped, and Sherlock again felt a spike of discomfort at not knowing what he was expected to do in the face of this outpouring of emotion. ‘It got so out of hand. I hadn’t intended it to go on for so long.’

Sherlock eyed St Clair icily, bitterness on his tongue. But he held it, in deference to John who was not there, and nodded once, to one or all of them. He hardly cared. Again he looked at his fists and waited while they took the unwashed man away.

The silence that followed was almost unbearable. 

At this moment in the previous five cases he and John had completed since his return – when he had arrived bruised and shaking and feeling excruciatingly, fundamentally alien – John had turned to him, mouth twisting in a smirk that he refused to dim. ‘Amazing,’ he had said, twice; ‘Brilliant,’ and ‘Wonderful,’ each once; ‘Not one for the blog, that’, most recently and with a laugh in his voice; and, on the first case after Sherlock’s return, only the smirk, a shared unspoken signal, followed by possibly the second hug he had ever received as an adult. This first post-case reaction had surprised Sherlock, not least because he and John, though by all accounts more demonstrative than many friends and even some couples, did not previously hug. More than anything, though, Sherlock had been staggered. He felt the lightening of something in his chest, a thing which had been leeching off every heartbeat he had endured while being ‘away’. Pressed between him and John, his own arms wrapping high around John’s shoulders and clinging slightly childishly to him, the horrible evil thing in Sherlock’s chest had been squished out of existence. He had felt the first genuine smile crack his face since John had clocked the chief superintendent roughly 800 days earlier.

Not today, though.

Sherlock tried to regulate his breathing as he realised, somewhat numbly, he was losing control of it. He could not stay here, have Bradstreet walk back in on Sherlock Holmes, the prodigal detective, having a meltdown in a stinking West-Central London overnight cell like a common drunk or prostitute. With numb fingers, he picked up his Belstaff – reclaimed from Molly’s flat after his third day back (she had, miraculously, had it dry-cleaned since he had last seen it, a gift for which he was still unspeakably grateful) – and pushed his arms into it. The buttons felt smooth and familiar but his hands trembled slightly with the fastenings. It took him approximately twenty extra seconds to secure them all properly. Had he not been on the verge of a minor nervous collapse, he would not have needed to approximate.

Wordlessly – for, if he had perfected nothing else in his time ‘away’, it was his air of invisibility – he slipped out of the station and back onto the bustling, zooming, unseasonably cool concrete-and-rain tapestry of the street which leant the station its name. Exhaust, grease fumes, mist, rubbish, heated rubber, millions upon millions of _people_ … He filled his lungs with it. Passers-by took no notice of him, a hazy sensation he had hoped to have abandoned completely after returning to 221b. Sherlock closed his eyes.

John was distressed. He had accused Neville St Clair of failing to trust his wife (the same wife, Sherlock noted, teeth clenching, whom John had been very tactilely comforting for most of the previous night). Sherlock was not so emotionally ignorant as to fail to appreciate the connection. So John was distressed… still. Distressed, because of what Sherlock had done. Because he had broken their trust.

Sherlock’s mobile vibrated in his pocket. Eyes shooting open, he located it and – no, he frowned, no, no, _no_. 

_Another happy conclusion, I take it? –MH_

With a growl that made a passing flutist – recently broken up with her boyfriend, she ended it; off to a practice session with a fellow Academician, a cellist who fancied her; worried about upcoming travel expenses; slightly hungover from too much white wine – glance at him in alarm, he punched a reply. His hands were shaking.

_Don’t you have some international treaties to disregard somewhere? –SH_

A hand on his shoulder made him start. Turning around, he found the young detective sergeant – Priya Challa, first year in her current position, so not one of those at all affected by his… absence; about to get engaged; sculpted hideous abstracts in her spare time – smiling serenely at him.

‘Inspector Bradst–’

‘Tell him I’m already leaving,’ he responded quickly, raising his arm for a taxi. One drove immediately past. Delightful.

‘New policy, sir,’ she told him, somewhat apologetically. ‘You have to bring in your license and sign your statement, within the hour.’

His phone buzzed, and he glowered. _Paperwork, brother dear, how quaint. Welcome to the glorious world of bureaucracy. –MH_

Sherlock replied in an extended profanity and shoved his mobile so deeply into his pocket he felt the seams protest. ‘Fine,’ he accepted, hoping the sergeant hadn’t noticed (but of course no one ever noticed anything) the tremor in his voice. It wasn’t as if he was wanted at home. And, perhaps this could be part of the new leaf he hoped to turn as part of his reunion with the right side of the law. Or at least most of the right side.

An hour later, empty stomach cramping and left leg asleep, he was reconsidering his foliaceous allegiances.

If nothing else, explaining his logic on paper (well, electronic paper, Bow Street was hardly in the dark ages, no matter how archaic their representatives’ methodologies) had focussed his mind on facts, concrete and unemotional. He felt, in spite of the paraesthesia along his side, steadier. He rose, handing his curt but thorough explanation of events and the copy of private detective’s license (he, unlike John, was under no false impression that that had been Mycroft’s personal payback for Sherlock’s secrecy) to Sergeant Challa. 

‘As if there weren’t already an overwhelming majority of incentives on the criminal side,’ he remarked.

She didn’t laugh, though of course, it wasn’t really a joke. ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t say that to Dr Watson?’ Challa paused. ‘You weren’t incredibly kind to him today.’

Sherlock looked her over. This uncomfortably astute observation bore none of the obvious traces (posture, facial expression, breathing, proximity of nearest eavesdropper) of malice. ‘No,’ he agreed at last. No, he hadn’t been.

As if stuck in a particularly stubborn temporal wrinkle, Sherlock returned to the exact spot on the pavement, feeling the same queasy undulation in his stomach. No, indeed – he had, quite accidentally, already discovered John’s dark humour had acquired a rather predictable lacuna roughly the size and shape of Sherlock’s bloodied doppelganger. His outburst on the second or third case after reinstatement – Lestrade’s reinstatement as well as his, he found himself satisfied to know –, that ‘Oh, _god_ , no wonder he killed himself, if this is the standard of artistic merit in this country!’, had earned him a slap from Mrs Hudson (of all people!) and a stony silence from John for almost three days. Only when he apologised to John and, in John’s presence, their landlady, had normal domestic relations resumed.

It was going to drizzle, pour, dry up, and then (tomorrow) storm, he felt with certainty that was tinged, a bit madly, with affection. Nowhere rained with quite such constant paradoxical variety as Britain.

His breathing had settled during the brain-dulling tedium of ‘paperwork’, but he marched homeward attempting to pretend to himself that he was not at all nervous that John had left. Hedging his bets, he diverted three streets and picked up their dry cleaning and some batteries (John’s old electric razor was nearly dead) before resuming his route. His step felt uneven the whole way. 

When he got there, Baker Street was empty.

* * *

For several minutes, Sherlock stood, taking in all the data – shoe pile disturbed, medical journals rigorously re-stacked, light switched on and back off (drops of misty rain on the plastic), cooler air in the flat (John left his window upstairs open throughout most of the summer) – to ground himself in the reality. John wasn’t here, but he had been. His things were still here. He was planning – eventually – to return. In which case, Sherlock would wait.

John had not stayed in Baker Street during their time apart. Though he had no interest in seeing the no doubt ghastly closet John had been inhabiting without him two-and-a-half miles north of his home, Sherlock had been obsessively curious (obviously, his mind was unstoppable that way) to know the details of John’s continued daily life while Sherlock himself was in France, Norway, Serbia, Indonesia, Florida, Venezuela, and finally England again. First he had absorbed clues from Molly, who (romantic) supplied nervous updates on John at Sherlock’s first hint. Then, after having to go without electronic contact for nearly three months, he resurfaced to find a communiqué from (and he despised how unsurprised he was) Mycroft. From then on, his irregular exchanges with various informants through official and deeply unofficial channels had sated his need for reassurance. John was alive; everything else was irrelevant.

During the work of those months, he had been Sigerson, Crick, Lewes, and even (in a nod to his mother’s side of the family) a Bonham-Carter. These men, dangerous and isolated, made little haptic interaction with the world except in violent, noisy, impossibly veiled collisions, before sinking back into obscurity. 

But at night, or between jobs, on the stoops of cathedrals or in high-rise high-tech office skyscrapers or in copses outside villages, he had _felt_ , physically, the absence of John.

It had been the first hurdle of their relationship, and it had been a surprisingly big obstacle for Sherlock. People had often gotten close, drawn in by the (melo)drama, the amazement, the sublimity of real genius coupled with ‘crime-fighting’ (too many cop shows, too little understanding of motives or science or the accidental detritus criminals left behind). Yes, people had gotten close, but then, feline, Sherlock snapped, bristled, hissed, arched his back and scratched, and suddenly people remembered: they were dog-people. They liked cuddles and affection and, deep down yes, normality. Everyday life. Average. 

So the Hurdle of Proximity was, and ever had been, the biggest one for Sherlock, because few people had proved the adage better than he: that familiarity bred contempt. A small cadre of exceptions – Lestrade, Mrs Hudson, even quiet, awkward, resilient, impressive Molly Hooper – understood that, despite his usual distaste for being held, Sherlock up-close was an amazing sight to behold. 

In this, again, John was unique. Because John… John was closer to him than anyone. John had spent their entire first night _near_ Sherlock: at Angelo’s, at the flat, in taxis, at the crime scene, at Bart’s lab. Close to Sherlock, and unfazed. 

At which point he had arrived at the Second Hurdle: why bother. Sherlock was not naturally self-pitying. Nevertheless, particularly during and since his absence, he was forced to admit (even if just to himself) that he presented virtually _no_ up-side to a potential partner (platonic or otherwise). Admittedly he could answer questions with an accuracy exponentially higher than an average (i.e. mundane, and therefore largely worthless) mind; he could solve crimes and put ‘bad’ people off the streets. Granted. 

But at home, he provided… what? In John’s case, the only possible word ( _companionship_ ) was itself a misnomer. Sherlock was the least companionable person he knew: he was seldom willing to tag along, to listen disinterestedly, to give those little pre-packaged words of comfort and reassurance and inspiration which other people sought from their _companions_. 

During his months beyond the pale, he had longed, viscerally, for the idiotic muddle of the little unimportant gestures that, he discovered once deprived, had somehow become just as essential to him as to the other billion fools the world over. He had sworn, on his last cigarette while nursing four broken ribs in Jakarta, that if he ever found himself blissfully, undeservedly lucky enough to stand in 221b again, he would commit himself, mind and body, to patient study and application of such small kindnesses, useless though they were scientifically.

He put the dry cleaning on the back of John’s door, swapped batteries in John’s razor and set aside the old ones for proper disposal, and even washed his saliva experiment before placing the clean test tube on the drying rack beside the previous tube from the previous week. (Well putting them away would be pointless, as he was going to need them again tomorrow, since the case was now finished.)

Still John was not there.

Perhaps… Sherlock fished out his phone. No messages or missed calls. He supposed it was, in the spirit of communication, a good idea to inform John of the case’s completion. He thumbed out a text and sent it. Then a second, informing John of his good errand. The _whurrrp_ of the message flying from his hand straight (well, to a signal tower, conglomeration of satellites, second tower, and then straight) to John’s hand was intoxicating. And infuriating.

John would come home, and then Sherlock would explain – explain that he wasn’t like Neville St Clair. _Money_ , he had summarised: the man had left his family, lied to them and ignored them, for _money_. Even four years ago, after the pool, Sherlock could have appreciated the practical importance of trusting one’s closest allies with information. (Besides, a disguise – and a clever, effective disguise, at that – was hardly something to become bashful about.) But now, after just under 800 days of simmering, acidic paranoia corroding him, of a thing nurtured by his self-hatred and by the gnawing fear that he would miss a vital clue and cost John his life (or Mrs Hudson’s, or Lestrade’s), but most of all by the deeper, ineradicable terror that eventually John would not want him close, he considered Neville St Clair a fool of the most selfish, sickening kind.

For all that he seemed like the fantasy-come-true of some middle-aged, sleepy woman from the Cotswolds, Captain John Watson, MD, was a protector, a rage-prone guard with little stomach for liars, cheaters, traitors, or fools. If ever Sherlock had doubted this, John had reminded him today.

Sherlock was determined, then, not to be a fool any longer. 

He had never wanted, though he undeniably enjoyed the theatrics of it, to be a self-diagnosed sociopath flouncing about as if in a perpetual fourteen-year old strop. (Being an adolescent had been a tedious, horrific enough experience when it was happening.) Nor did he desire to become Mycroft, sitting in his palatial office or home and not knowing the one from the other, allowing his mind to form into well-ordered and highly-polished machinery. Sherlock loved the leap, the jolt of the streets, the amazing always-fascinating possibility of what interesting thing people might be up to. (They disappointed more often then not, but – as John was so ready to remind him – not always.) The fact that he, the great Sherlock Holmes, might have to _wash his own bloody dishes_ and _fetch his own sodding mobile_ was, though he would never admit it, the real reason he called Baker Street home, had worked for just under 800 days to get back to it: because John thought he could do anything.

And that, _there_ , was the reason Sherlock felt a sharp drop in his chest and a flutter beneath his left pectoral muscle. Because Sherlock was unquestionably a better person (kinder, more patient, more selfless – he had done _paperwork_ , for god’s sake!) _because_ of John. The idea that John might take pride in having contributed something to the world’s only consulting detective was, in Sherlock’s mind, incredible.

Maybe, Sherlock reasoned, he should get some milk.

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon references, characters, and other incidental allusions continue to belong to wherever they came from. Errors, on the other hand, are entirely my own.  
> *As was perhaps obvious, my timeline for this series does not comply exactly with canon or, according to [ finalproblem](http://finalproblem.tumblr.com/post/18614505174/i-noticed-something-re-watching-reichenbach-at-the), the BBC Sherlock timeline. Rather than accepting either of these realities I have [substituted my own](http://arabella-strange.tumblr.com/post/57968869046/for-my-own-reference-more-so-flying-in-the). Also, partly because it's true and partly because it's _hilarious_ , I included the recent development that private detectives in Britain [will be required to have a license](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23519690), assuming that Sherlock would have both wanted to be at and have been shunted to the front of that particular bureaucratic queue.
> 
> All comments much appreciated!


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Milky tea in hand, he turned for the sitting room, then stopped short. He was surprisingly unsurprised._   
>  _‘Hello,’ he said._   
>  _‘Hello,’ Sherlock replied quietly._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEYO, ratings-content ahoy!

Baker Street saw, not for anything like the first time, the bullish pacing of one of its two inhabitants, treading out his anger through his socks into the carpet. 

(John had rotely kicked off his shoes into the dark space behind the landing door where a small avalanche of their mingled footwear again, after a long reprieve, rested. Only a minute later, when he realised the reason – or one reason – for his tense expression was the stench of his shoes, did he retrieve the pair from the pile and carry them up to his room, to rest on his open window-sill, soles upturned.)

He needed to think. The fingers of his left hand kept caressing the digits of his phone, as if itching to betray his decision not to ring Mrs St Clair himself, to tell her with brutal efficiency just why she had been crying and preparing to mourn for a man she loved and believed in. Finally, after a tenth or fifteenth turn at his window, his eye caught his well-worn trainers on the sill as the wind breathed a hint of rain over them. He stopped.

_Money. How terribly dull._

His phone clattered across the carpet as he half-threw, half-dropped it. He had to go out, to do something – Sherlock wouldn’t be home for hours, probably, and John wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the rest of the story. Stooping to pick up his phone, his back gave a twinge of protest, and he heard as if a perverse echo, _I’m fine, John, stop hovering._

_Fine._

_Fine_ , was it? he thought, his left hand and jaw clenching in unison. _Fine_ , with his shoulders hunched and something wrong with his heel, _fine_ on his own, _fine_ when Neville St Clair had disappeared leaving nothing but a blood splatter in an East End drug hovel, leaving the one person in his life who had sworn in words and actions to believe in him, to trust him, to put him ahead of everyone and everything else because she loved him, this man had made this woman believe he was dead, had blind-sided her with the fear that kept her up at nights and stopped her midway through her coffees while she watched the news, throat tight, terrified, with the knowledge that one day, someday, the best part of her life would require her identification so it could be put in the _ground_ –

He gasped, hotly, struggling to see through the stinging wetness on his face, where he found himself on the floor. His beige carpet stared callously back.

He sniffed, waited for his stomach to settle. Slowly it shifted from churning to simply aching, but he made himself stand, ignoring the keening of his knees as he rose. On his feet again, he blinked. He scrubbed fiercely at his face with knuckled fingers, and ignored the water on his hands except to wipe it on his jeans. 

He had wanted to go out. He made himself do that too.

(At the door, he toed into his classic, familiar brogues, then reached for his jacket, only to find he was still wearing it.)

For the next few hours, he threw himself into a series of self-imposed tasks. He walked the long circular route of Regents Park, in open defiance of the stifling air that threatened rain, a regulated march stopped only when he felt sweat gathering clammily at his collar. Then he ducked over to a café across the road, sitting outside beneath the awning and made some phone calls. First to the clinic, to accept some shifts for the following week; next to the hardware shop across town, who still had yet to receive the cleaner he needed to remove the metal stains from the kitchen table; to his mate from uni, Miles Hearn, wishing his answer phone a happy birthday and offering a pint for the next time he came up from Berwick. He ignored the double-beep during his message of an incoming call, and the later chimes of texts once he had hung up. Even so, when he finished it was only early afternoon, and his leg was stiff from an uneven day of activity and inactivity. He ignored his body and ventured back into the park. 

It was beginning to rain.

Staring ahead as he walked, he saw a school group assemble on the grass as they listened in wrapt attention to a tall gangly man in a navy jumper, gesticulating energetically with his clipboard. Two boys at the back, though, were visibly not listening. One, taller, chubbier, was smirking and directing with a composer’s sweeping grandeur his short, fair, curly-haired friend, who was bounding in great loops around him, his own arms flapping as he raced and spun, clearly (in the spirit of child’s play the world over) trying evade as many raindrops as possible.

Just as the teacher stopped and began to bark at one or the other of the duo, another teacher – a javelin thrower of a woman in a grey button-up with the same crest on the front as the man, carrying an oversized umbrella – interrupted him. A brief conference had the children tittering hopefully. The man nodded and, as the matriarch stomped away, blew his whistle. A few children cheered as they all followed off the grass.

John sighed. He supposed he ought to go home.

* * *

‘Sherlock?’ he called tentatively as he peeked in the kitchen. Nothing answered. ‘Of course not,’ he told the kettle, picking it up to refill it. ‘Paperwork.’

He smiled minutely at the picture of Sherlock, forced to play by the book and do his own bloody clean-up after a case. He hoped Bradstreet would add to their growing album of such unusual moments.

He finally shrugged off his jacket and prepared for himself a roast beef sandwich with almost no conscious thought. He hadn’t eaten, he realised with a pang, since last night in Kent. He dreaded, with a grim sense of déjà-vu, to think how long ago Sherlock had eaten. Suddenly he felt entirely drained.

Neville St Clair was, he told himself as he chewed, nothing new. Money, Sherlock had said, and John supposed, what with the decline in many journalism jobs, and the two St Clair children probably growing out of their clothes every other month, he had only done what he thought was best. The mistake of faking his death had probably been just that: a mistake. And, John added to himself as he rinsed his plate of crumbs, wasn’t it better, in some ways, that it had all been a mistake? That he wasn’t, after all, dead?

Grey rain darkened the room as John thought, and waited.

At last, when he caught himself nodding off at the table, he gave up on the whole day and climbed the stairs again. He deposited his keys, phone, wallet, and notebook absently on his dresser. Sitting on his bed heavily, he realised that the window was still open, but he found he simply could not be bothered. Instead, he tilted back, full and yet somehow still aching, and slept.

* * *

_Glass. Shards, sharp. Clear-grey and frosted blue and ivy-yellow green, a sea of it, sharp, sharp, fragile, dangerous._

_The street was empty, but John smelled sweat, rank, hot; his own, but also more. He tried to stop up his nose with his hand, but – sharp!_

_‘Ah!’ His palm sprouted bright red, more heat, coppery. Splat, splat. He rolled it between his fingers, wincing, and felt the blood congeal and cake like clay._

_A sickening crunch, a grunt. He looked up – Sherlock was there, a few yards ahead, wading towards him through the ocean of broken glass._

_‘No,’ John told him, ‘ _no_ , don’t.’_

_‘I have to, John,’ Sherlock insisted angrily._

_Jars and dishes and windowpanes and beakers and mirrors and his mother’s old antique paperweight flew in a continuous storm, sailing through the street’s open windows, shattering noiselessly._

_‘Sherlock, stop,’ John begged, holding out his arms even though he knew he would only be cut more._

_‘I can’t,’ said Sherlock, and John gasped in horror as he saw the grotesque geometric shapes, dozens, slicing and embedding in Sherlock’s sides, his arms, his neck. His blood dribbled down to glitter on the pavement. Splat, splat._

_All at once, John surged toward him, willing himself to get there, to stop up each of the dozens of cuts with his hands –_

_‘No!’ he cried, when Sherlock grasped a jagged chink of their mint green vase that Mrs Hudson had given them last Christmas, holding it to his own forehead. ‘Please, Sherlock, don’t!’_

_‘I have to,’ Sherlock repeated, in agony, drawing the shard into his face with the searing precision of a scalpel, tears on his cheeks, ‘I have to – the case, John, I have to –’_

_His face was falling off into his hands, blood pooling and obscuring his eyes, his beautiful every-colour eyes, just like before, and John’s feet were too big, or too small, or detached from the rest of him, and he couldn’t get there, he wasn’t fast enough. The lacerated body was melting into the tide of glass –_

_‘No, please, please,’ he sobbed, ‘please, no–’_

With a jerk, he awoke.

He rolled, practiced, into sitting, pushed his head between his knees. He nearly choked on cool air in burning gasps; he managed not to be sick on his own feet. Only just.

A horrific gentle noise behind him made him twist, immediately alert, to see where the darkness of the street nevertheless glinted on a tiny pool beneath his open window. The laces of his shoes were swaying with each flurry of rain, dripping.

_Splat, splat._

He exhaled slowly, and tried to make his body stop shaking. Slowly, as he sat there, rationalising the panic away with the dewy breeze of the rain chilling his back, he remembered how to breathe. 

The clock gleamed _20:56_.

His vest, realised after a moment, was sticking to his back, so he manoeuvred and wrestled it over his head, then tossed it with a _whoosh_ in the shadowy direction of his hamper. It missed. For a feverish moment, this single problem made him wanted to curl into his pillows and cry himself back to sleep. Instead, because he knew he was not ill, his leaden muscles shook in a single, mirthless laugh.

A while later, he pulled himself into his jeans, and put on another t-shirt; he removed his socks, slightly annoyed with himself. He never slept well with his socks on. 

_Splat, splat, splat._

Rising, he shut the window gently and placed his soaking shoes beside their puddle on the floor. 

Though he no longer worried he might be sick, he tried to ignore the uncomfortable newly-woken sensation of hyperawareness of his limbs, of the ticking of his watch in the silent room, of his elevated core body temperature. He swallowed again and went downstairs without his phone. His hands felt paper-thin on the smooth banister.

In the kitchen, the fluorescent light shone harshly from beneath the cupboards so he didn’t bother to switch on the overhead. As he grabbed his army mug from the drying board, his hand grazed one of Sherlock’s test tubes, which for one heart-stopping second teetered on its head. His throat clogged. He forced himself to exhale through his nose until the kettle clicked off several minutes later.

Milky tea in hand, he turned for the sitting room, then stopped short. He was surprisingly unsurprised.

‘Hello,’ he said.

‘Hello,’ Sherlock replied quietly.

Even obscured by the dusky orange-blue light pouring in from Baker Street, the mere silhouette of him calmed John. At last the dizzy, wrong-footed feeling that had been sitting on him all day ebbed into nothing. He inhaled deeply.

‘Nightmare,’ Sherlock diagnosed without moving. John closed his eyes and focussed on Sherlock’s voice, his real voice, pushing the echo – _I can’t, I have to, John, the case, I have to_ – out through his nostrils; he breathed this Sherlock, the real one, who was here, in his suit, home and whole and quiet, into his lungs, into every corpuscle, down to his toes.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed finally.

John folded onto the sofa and set his tea on the table. The rain seemed to be slowing outside, but then, he admitted internally, he had slept through the evening. He listened to the street and Sherlock’s breathing.

‘I’m sorry, John,’ Sherlock said, after so long that John wondered if his mind had drifted and he had missed something.

‘Sorry?’ he repeated. ‘For what?’

After another moment, Sherlock caught his eye and said, almost urgently, ‘I had no idea you would be so affected. Even after…’

In the darkness, John watched his hands wrap themselves around his warm mug. _Yes_ , he thought, as loudly as possible, broadcasting it from his chest, to the one person he had ever considered capable of mind-reading. _Even still, after all this time_. 

He heard more than saw Sherlock come to sit close beside him on the settee, a rustle of fabric as he pulled up the cloth at his knees. Sherlock had never understood personal space.

‘Today, you told Mr St Clair that he should have trusted his wife.’ He paused and John continued looking straight ahead. Again he sensed rather than saw Sherlock turn to look at him. ‘Do still trust me?’

Surprised, John did look round, into his every-colour eyes that were reflecting the light from the kitchen.

‘Yes,’ he told him, because it was true.

Sherlock considered him for a moment. ‘I picked up your–’

‘You had a piece of glass in your shoe,’ John interrupted. Sherlock stopped. ‘All day.’

‘Yes,’ he nodded, frowning, clearly unsure what John meant by this seemingly obvious and random observation.

‘You…’ John sighed, then finished, lamely, ‘you might have cut yourself.’

A familiar ripple of scepticism crossed Sherlock’s face, softened by an unfamiliar gentleness. ‘Unless I was going to stand _on top_ of my shoes, John, that seems rather unlike–’

John kissed him.

For a second he kept his eyes shut and simply kissed him, savouring the fraction of his life where he didn’t ache for wondering what that mouth was good for if not insulting or sneering at him because, oh, he knew now and was not going to be able to forget –

Then Sherlock’s hand rested lightly along his jaw, his callused fingers worrying the soft place below John’s left ear, and John fractured into a thousand pieces –

Sherlock’s _mouth_ , Christ, it was warm and insistent and inseparable from his, and the high plaintive noise in his throat wasn’t _John_ , couldn’t be John, because he wasn’t even sure if he was himself anymore, never mind awake, and _kissing the real, living Sherlock Holmes, and whimpering_.

His own hands, warmed from his tea, were scrambling for somewhere to hold Sherlock closer, somehow; his lapels, his neck, his sharp, wide shoulders through his jacket – 

‘John?’ Sherlock murmured, low, and John reflexively gripped him tighter and shook his head and turned to tip Sherlock’s face to one side so he could try kissing him here, sucking a mark into his neck while his clenched hands no doubt left creases in this shirt that would be impossible to iron out. He sucked a patch over Sherlock’s artery until he squirmed, his own hands threaded in John’s hair as if ensnared.

Years or aeons later, Sherlock hummed softly, ‘John,’ and then, when this had no effect, tugged faintly at him, his voice thrumming in the cords of his neck, ‘John, stop.’ Instantly John withdrew his teeth and tongue but didn’t, he wasn’t sure he physically _could_ , remove his mouth from Sherlock’s skin now that he had tasted it. He panted, resting his cheek against Sherlock’s jaw, and felt his stomach flip with shame. After a minute he slowly sat back and, with conscious effort, released his grip.

Sherlock was flushed, his hair wild in a way that John only saw after fist-fights with criminals and particularly long showers; his shirt as undone to the third button (had _he_ done that? How many hands had he grown in the last few minutes?); his neck was wet and red and bruising where John’s mouth had been.

‘Shit,’ John blurted out under his breath, slurring with embarrassment, ‘That – god, I’m sorry–’

‘Stop,’ Sherlock commanded again, and John’s mouth snapped shut. Sherlock’s chest swelled and fell several times before he finally spoke. ‘John… I wanted to thank you for your help with the case today. And your concern for…’ he paused, ‘my shoe. But you… you have undergone a certain degree of unusually high stress in the past twenty-four hours, in addition to running on very little sleep, and if –’

‘What!’ he exclaimed. Was that what he thought? _Stress_? In the pandemonium of things John was currently feeling, stress was decidedly absent. Horror slid into his stomach instead. ‘Christ, Sherlock, I don’t go around snogging people because I – I’m _stressed_ , how can you…’ John’s throat caught on nothing. He wanted to laugh, or scream. ‘You prat. You treated me like shit today and all I could think, all day, was how I would follow you to bloody Antarctica if that’s where I had to go to stop you being beat to a pulp. You’re…’ He stopped and looked at his hands, clasped white-knuckled on his knees, only inches from Sherlock’s knees.

‘Then you–’ 

John’s head snapped up. Sherlock glanced at John’s mouth so quickly he almost missed it, before returning his gaze. John swallowed again. 

‘In that case, I believe I interrupted you prematurely. Please continue.’

The polite composure with which Sherlock enunciated this statement struck John first as hilarious, and second as staggering. Uncertain, he searched Sherlock’s face for anything like a joke. In its place he saw simple fear.

‘Okay,’ he whispered. 

Sherlock watched him slide forward a second time, John’s thumb tipping Sherlock’s mouth up to meet his. These kisses were languid, long deliberate slides of lips that sent a cascade of heat through John’s body. When eventually Sherlock’s hand found the back of his neck again, he couldn’t help his tongue darting out to press a heavy line along Sherlock’s bottom lip in appreciation. Sherlock groaned.

John’s instincts were carrying him, helping him through the strangely wonderfully easy motions as he found himself pressed chest to chest with Sherlock while the violinist’s long hands crept cautiously under his cotton t-shirt, while his own hands worked Sherlock’s jacket off and his midnight blue button-up (black in the evening half-light of the sitting room) all the way open. He ran his fingers self-indulgently along Sherlock’s ribs, and felt him moan into his mouth.

‘Fuck,’ John gasped, unable to contain himself. Sherlock had the nerve to chuckle shakily. John felt like he was boiling. He traced his fingers across Sherlock’s abdomen again for the sheer thrill of it. After several heated seconds he lifted his eyes to Sherlock’s. The sight of him, waiting and half-dressed and stunning in the reflection of the kitchen glow, flooded him with the desire to see him _wrecked_ , breathless, everywhere. 

He kissed him again, leaning into him greedily, his fingertips slipping to the top of Sherlock’s trousers. 

‘If you want this to stop, now would be a very good time to say so,’ he informed him, voice muffled by his thick tongue.

Sherlock didn’t move except to accept John’s mouth and touch, his stomach rising and falling around John’s fingers. When John waited for a more explicit invitation, Sherlock snorted in annoyance, though his voice was pitched so low John felt it sink into his bones. ‘If there were anything I didn’t want from you, John, you would know.’

 _Anything_ – all at once John needed to be closer to him, pressing his mouth into Sherlock’s mouth as his left hand confidently unfastened Sherlock’s buckle and the first clasp of his trousers as he crowded him back with his entire body to stretch across the length of the sofa. Sherlock licked up into John’s mouth with humming approval and shifted his knees to pin them around John’s sides, lifting his hips forward. John’s breath caught; his jeans would very soon be either completely superfluous or ruined. He didn’t much care.

Bracing his right hand just under Sherlock’s armpit on the settee, John’s forehead bumped with Sherlock’s as he panted, drinking down air as Sherlock teased the nape of his neck with his fingers, kissing John’s cheek and jaw and neck with a purposefulness that made him see stars.

‘ _Fuck_ ,’ he growled, and thrust his hand below Sherlock’s waistband to grip his cock before he could overthink it. With relief and at least five degrees’ increase on his body temperature John found Sherlock hard and hot in his palm. He ran his thumb along his length causing Sherlock’s hips to stutter back into the sofa before jumping up into John’s grasp for more. Hungrily, John managed to shove Sherlock’s trousers down to his thighs and nearly came then and there at the sight of his hips, his cock, his dark wiry hair, the flushed naked plane of skin from his collarbone to his knees.

‘John,’ Sherlock grunted, his own hand groping John’s backside. John shivered, and planted his lips back on Sherlock’s as his hand began to stroke clumsily, restlessly, along Sherlock’s prick. Before long Sherlock was leaking onto his palm, slicking each stroke while he whined into John’s ear.

‘God, Sherlock,’ John kept saying, uncontrollably hard, fighting pressing his own erection into Sherlock’s through the unforgiving tightness of his jeans. ‘God, you’re _gorgeous_ , come on. You’re insane, _oh_ , you’re gorgeous, come on…’

Sherlock was already close, he could tell, his hips were out of rhythm with the rest of his body and his breath was shot, his eyes screwed tight as he bit his lip, and John didn’t stop, wanted to see it, applied every fibre of his being into pushing Sherlock over the edge.

‘Come on, Sherlock, come on, for me,’ he murmured, and Sherlock moaned and bowed up into his palm and came, hot and thick, between them, shuddering, until John couldn’t wait another second. Taking his hand to his own flies, he unzipped his jeans and wiggled his hand to free his own cock where it was possibly the hardest it had been since the previous best sex of his life, with the barwoman in Germany during his leave after a full year of nothing but his own hands in the desert. He winced at how close he was and with each pull of his slick hand (slick, he thought, and oh that brought a harsh groan up from his toes), his knuckles brushed Sherlock’s still heaving stomach just beneath him, above his legs which went on at least a mile even hitched around John. His head fell forward and he breathed in the sweat at Sherlock’s neck as he felt his orgasm close in.

Sherlock’s hand intruded dumbly and wrapped around his own, his fingers adding pressure to John’s and suddenly John’s rhythm became a punishing erratic pull of two, three strokes and then, _oh_ –

His breath returned incrementally to normal as sound and vision also reasserted themselves. Pushing fractionally upwards he rolled to the small space between Sherlock and the back of the couch. From under the cushion, Sherlock's hand produced one of the kitchen rags they had binned (he thought) years ago. Considering its history, he wasn't sure it qualified as 'clean', but he took it anyway.

He felt pliable, warm, tired, and… he turned his face into Sherlock’s shoulder and smirked. If people had talked before… ‘Well,’ he muttered, to the ceiling.

‘Yes, I think you have a point,’ Sherlock confirmed solemnly. 

After a silent second, they both burst out laughing, a rumbling jollity that shook their chests.

‘God, I’m exhausted,’ John admitted, smiling into Sherlock’s shoulder, when the laughter subsided. ‘And I definitely need to shower. And _you_ need to eat something.’

Sherlock ‘hmm’ed ambiguously, his eyes shut. 

‘No, no, up you get, you daft scarecrow,’ he insisted, shifting to sit up and poking at Sherlock’s sides. ‘I’m not having you wake me up with your stomach grumbling in an hour just because you’re too lazy to eat now.’

Though his eyes remained closed, Sherlock said, ‘Wake you up?’

John ceased poking him, momentarily speechless. Then, attempting normalcy, he clambered off the sofa, shoving Sherlock’s tangle of legs to the floor with a muted _thud_ as he got to his feet, quickly adjusting his clothes into some semblance of order. 

‘I’m showering,’ he announced, trying for (and not quite achieving) his customary authoritative tone, ‘and so help me, Sherlock, if when I get out you haven’t had at least a biscuit.’

Without another glance, John vaulted up the stairs two at a time. 

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Blatant canon-scrambling because, well, _that quote_.  
>  Comments always appreciated.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the longstanding game to outpace Sherlock’s imagination, John had surpassed himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Mild TW: mentions of past violence. Also, don't look up Rhinosporidiosis if you're squeamish.

Sherlock waited exactly eleven seconds before hurtling himself haphazardly into his room.

Based on his movements (or lack thereof), John was standing one storey above, much as Sherlock was doing now (i.e., still), though presumably not in precisely a spot tested to be invisible from any exterior angle even in daylight. A moment later, John’s floorboard whined, his door creaked, and then John’s footsteps were trampling down the stairs, across the kitchen (past Sherlock’s room, past his open door) and into the bathroom. A quick echoing yelp: ah, John’s eyes – well, all human eyes, for that matter – took roughly ten to fifteen minutes to adjust from darkness to illumination, based on the completeness of either environment. A guttural belch from the pipes downstairs signalled two seconds before the water sprayed the tile basin of the shower; another seventeen seconds before John (presumably stripped bare) stepped in.

So. Sherlock had approximately eighteen minutes before John would return and…

And what? Sherlock was abruptly aware that he was standing, in his room, in the dark, pulse racing, shirt unbuttoned, trousers and pants hastily wrenched up around his hips, hands and lower abdomen coated in his and another man’s semen.

In the longstanding game to outpace Sherlock’s imagination, John had surpassed himself.

Somewhat hurriedly, Sherlock went to the floor and retrieved his erratically-used box of cleaning agents from under his bed, selecting an odourless, near-industrial-strength sanitiser and an ordinary cotton cloth. His hands removed mechanically his (soiled) clothing, placing the various articles in their proper receptacles for washing or dry cleaning. His mind, offline for the better part of the last half-hour in which he had almost certainly ruined his and John’s relationship, was roaring back to life.

As he stood, holding his right sock in his hand, the _snap_ of a shampoo bottle in the bathroom next door struck his eardrums like a bullwhip. 

_He and John had had sex._

(Part of Sherlock’s brain was tripping over the influx of new information:  
• John was vocal, noisy even, and reliant largely on profanity during sex [ _this was not new information except in terms of direct observation_ ];  
• John’s scar was a yellow-white blast of smooth skin [ _this was not new either except the extent of its smoothness under Sherlock’s fingers_ ], but he had no other distinguishable dermatological features [ _that Sherlock had been able to see_ ];  
• John was efficient at undressing, but not fastidious about being fully undressed, for sex;  
• John smelled like sweat and something else approaching an oaky malt [ _Sherlock needed longer to establish exactly what, and why this scent reminded him of several childhood summers in Yorkshire_ ];  
• John was slightly [ _pleasantly_ ] heavy;  
• John’s areas of particular sensitivity: his earlobes, C2-C4 vertebrae, and nipples;  
• John was stronger than Sherlock [ _and, Sherlock licked his lips involuntarily at the memory, this had aroused, surprisingly, a strong, no doubt deep-seated thalamic response_ ];  
• John liked Sherlock’s mouth [ _the feeling was entirely mutual_ ].)

He shivered.

 _What_ had he been thinking? Or rather, how had he so catastrophically and categorically allowed himself to _stop_ thinking? He had wanted to apologise, to emphasise to John that he had read their situation correctly for once, and that he would endeavour in future to respect their partnership before launching into anything drastic. Except that was exactly what he had _not_ done: drastic was perhaps the only word for this escalation. 

(He silenced the baser voice in his mind which suggested mawkishly, _Amazing_.)

John had no idea what he had done, and Sherlock felt a widening terror in his chest that he was, inevitably, going to find out. Because Sherlock had spent two days in Bergen unable to stop thinking about the flatness of John’s top lip whenever he could not get good tea (which Bergen, for all its covert merits, did not offer), and Sherlock could not control either his feelings or himself. Sherlock had shouted at old ladies and small children; he wondered, in the small hours of the night, precisely how long it would take to infect a population of 10,000 with _Rhinosporidiosis_ if two hundred visited the same public swimming pool; he had arranged for the arson of a (admittedly neo-Nazi) school in Miami; he had injected a woman (admittedly, a drug dealer and abusive wife) with a lethal dose of heroin in Belgrade; he had strangled, stabbed, or shot four people (admittedly, killers themselves) in Marseille, Caracas, and Blackpool; he had allowed himself to care about three unprotected people and had spent the next not-quite-800 days shouting and destroying and killing people. He was not a good man.

A clatter (a bar of soap bouncing in the tub) broke him from this reverie. He drew open his dresser and absently picked out his pyjamas.

 _‘I would follow you to bloody Antarctica if that’s where I had to go to stop you being beat to a pulp,’_ John had said, causing a shudder under Sherlock’s skin exactly beneath where his fingers had been tracing Sherlock’s ribs –

And that was the crux of the problem: Sherlock adored John. He wanted him, desperately (he had, he was forced to admit, with the taste of John’s skin full in his mouth, for far more than 800 days). But he was not safe. Bergen, Miami, Belgrade: he had been beaten to a pulp in all three of those places, in addition to other activities about which he did not want John ever to know. He had been without John all that time, wanting him, but the idea that John wanted to follow him – intoxicating as it was – could only bring John to harm. 

Moreover, Sherlock was sickeningly aware, in the dark corners of himself, that returning to Baker Street was itself an indulgence. He brought the crosshairs of the countless shadowy threats to himself to refocus on the people he cared for. The Neville St Clairs of the world were their bread and butter; Moriarty had been, he fervently believed, unique; but the Morans, the nameless thugs and deranged criminals they encountered, would continue to be occupational hazards of the Work.

He found himself staring at the refrigerator contents, hand on the open door, with little memory of having brought himself there.

 _‘So help me, Sherlock, if when I get out you haven’t had at least a biscuit,’_ John had directed. Based on the higher pitch of the pipes and the splash patterns as John ran his hands through his hair, he was nearing the end of his shower. Sherlock’s stomach rumbled.

His loss of a full stone (all right, 252 ounces at its worst) during his absence evidently upset John, just as his lack of ‘healthy’ eating or exercise or sleep had bothered him during their previous cohabitation. These of course were only some of the behaviours which John found annoying, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate, but Sherlock had previously made a rather gleeful practice of ignoring his ministrations. 

_‘I’m not having you wake me up with your stomach grumbling in an hour just because you’re too lazy to eat now.’_

He grabbed the Wiltshire sliced ham and cheddar from the drawer (disinfected of his experiment with saliva, no matter what John or Mrs Hudson bemoaned). With silent efficiency he assembled a sandwich.

John expected him to be close enough to interrupt his sleep. Therefore John expected them to sleep together.

Straining slightly to reach the Grey Poupon at the back of the cupboard (John preferred yellow, like a builder or football enthusiast, _honestly_ ), he felt a stinging reminder of John’s tongue on his neck. Certainly the immediate interaction had been… gratifying. For both of them, it seemed too, even beyond the mere physiological reactions of male tissues and hormones to general stimuli. 

John had – had held him, gently. Had murmured clichés and then had laughed his high ridiculous laugh, _laughed with him_ , after the sordid, fantastic conclusion. And Sherlock had (rather too vocally, he recalled with disgust) wanted all of him. 

Previous evidence had indicated that John had never participated either in short- or longer-term romantic/sexual relations with other men, beyond perhaps some rather drunken semi-serious homosocial antics during various army and university holidays, none of which had ventured beyond fumbling and all of which could have (and had) been laughed off. Furthermore, John had almost explicitly wondered at Sherlock’s own non-platonic history, though it seemed he doubted various enemy insinuations of total ignorance. As usual, John respected Sherlock’s privacy. (He little needed to know either about Victor or Mycroft’s erstwhile aid Alec.) But John had, enthusiastically it seemed, thrown himself into proceedings; had groaned and grunted, and petted and encouraged and _kissed_ him with such heady, overwhelming confidence that Sherlock had been powerless to hold anything back, even had he wanted to. (Which, of course, he didn’t.)

Before he could stop himself, Sherlock had tidied away the ingredients and stealthily slipped up the stairs just as the hot water clunked off. 

Standing on John’s threshold, holding his sandwich, he felt completely ridiculous. John had been swimming in endorphins (so was he), but surely he… 

Sherlock then glanced at the wreck of John’s sheets. His nightmare, during which he had cried and repeated Sherlock’s name, entreating. The room was at least two degrees cooler despite being at the top of the building, but of course John had only closed his window upon waking. And his worn socks were on top of his laundry hamper (the idiot, he knew he became uncomfortable and prone to panic attacks when overheated in slumber). 

Once, just after Baskerville, Sherlock had almost involuntarily found himself standing in just the same spot, watching John thrash and hyperventilate and howl in his dreams. Paralysed, Sherlock had tried to recall what he had read since signing the lease on the subject of sleep disorder anxiety episodes, but had found himself unable to make the requisite motions from doorway to bedside. Pillows and sheets had been shoved at odd angles. The mattress had groaned slightly as John had dug his heels physically (and no doubt metaphorically) in. But still he had continued unconscious. Then suddenly, John’s mouth had formed a single articulate word, ‘ _Please_ ,’ with such heartbreaking sorrow that Sherlock had all but leapt toward him. 

Sitting firmly by John’s feet, he had spoken in a moderate, commanding voice, ‘John, _wake up_.’ 

Stirring slightly, John had frowned into his pillow, but soon sunk back into fretful sleep. Sherlock had laid his hand solidly on John’s hip, feeling himself electrified at such a touch, but had managed to repeat, clearly, ‘ _Wake up, John_.’ 

With an immediate hypnopompic switch, John had sat bolt upright in bed and grabbed his wrist in a bruising grip. Sweating, eyes dilated, momentarily disorientated, John had never seemed to Sherlock more materially, horrifically fragile. 

A moment later, John’s face had broken into an expression of mingled guilt and fear, as he had released him, apologising, ‘Shit, I – Sherlock, I’m – I’m…’

‘It’s fine, John,’ Sherlock had said in a reassuring undertone. ‘You were dreaming. It is still the middle of the night, and you are in your room in Baker Street, and everything is fine.’

John had bowed his head to nod, attempting to hide his tears. When eventually John's breathing had achieved a stable rate, Sherlock had moved to stand.

‘Wait,’ John had croaked. Sherlock had stilled. ‘Just… just give me a, a minute, and I…’ He had swallowed thickly, and worked through four therapy-approved breathing cycles. Then, at last, he had exhaled, ‘ _Stay_.’

Often times Sherlock knew that he was terrible at reading signals, at noticing what others needed, particularly when they felt they could express it indirectly with their (entirely mixed and unhelpful) body language. But John was direct, even in the midst of emotional turmoil in the dead of night. So Sherlock had stayed.

The bathroom door whisked open downstairs; he had approximately two minutes. What if John returned, cleansed of their encounter, and wanted to be alone? What if, after a lapse of time in which to think it over, he had changed his mind? (What if, demanded a pitiless interrogator in his mind, Sherlock broke him, like he broke everything else?) Sherlock found the potential consequences psychosomatically impaired his respiratory function.

But: _Antarctica_ , John had said; _eat something_ ; _gorgeous_ ; _for me_ …

Stubbornly, Sherlock marched directly to the side of the messy bed he knew was not John’s and planted himself on it. Even if John returned, or woke in the morning, regretting what had happened, Sherlock could not prevent himself seeking more. John would either have to give in to him, or push him explicitly away. The thugs and criminals would wait until tomorrow.

He took a bite of his sandwich.

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter in this fic, and then a sequel to follow... eventually.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the corridor, he found himself staring at Sherlock’s closed door. Ah.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eep, more of that ratings nonsense.

In the dim quiet, John knew his room was exactly the same. His bed was mussed from where he’d floundered in his nightmare. The contents of his pockets sat still on the tall dresser. It was cool but, well, the window hadn’t been shut that long. Yet with his heart hammering almost out of control (in part from running up the stairs and in part very much not), John felt suddenly strange. The room seemed … _larger_. His faded blue walls struck him as expansive and bare, and he realised he had never hung so much as a calendar. (None of his various girlfriends had brought this to his attention, probably because none of his previous girlfriends had been willing to spend much time at 221b, what with the mad genius haunting the place like a ghostly, incredibly untidy chaperone.) Even the strict tidiness of his floor, of his books in their imprecise stacks beneath his bed and his albums (vinyl and disc) in the crate in his wardrobe, caught his eye as never before. _Empty_ , he couldn’t help thinking.

He grabbed his dressing gown from beneath his dry cleaning on the hook on the back of his door and went downstairs again. 

As he passed, he saw out of the corner of his vision – he couldn’t help but notice – Sherlock was no longer splayed out on the sofa. Smirking to himself, he made for the shower, refusing to let his eye drift to Sherlock’s open bedroom door.

In the stark light of the bathroom, he waited while the water jumped, then eventually climbed in. The hot spray scalded his skin. Closing his eyes, he was glad of the opportunity to let his body drift fuzzily through the steps of shampoo, soap, and rinse, so he could concentrate on figuring out if they had just made a _huge_ mistake. They had, he thought, trying to be logical, gone almost completely the wrong way about all of this (relationships, affection, fighting, trust, death, personal lack-of-space, jealousy, love) and now were adding new components (kissing, sex, hands, mouths, cocks, skin) in one fell swoop. Sherlock was a _man_ , a man who took up more of the sofa around John, who had a harsher mouth, heavier hands, hairier feet, a muskier smell, a flatter chest, and 100% more cock than (almost) anyone he had previously slept with. Or ever really wanted to sleep with. 

But Sherlock also had smiled over his shoulder at John in Mr. Ramani’s defunct storage room, had watched John with pained prescience as he exposed Neville St Clair’s hoax, had not so long ago given up almost everything in his life so John wouldn’t lose his…

Somewhere between John’s lungs he still felt the bruise of that, of the continuous ache of more than two years without him. Which, he supposed, answered his question.

Unbidden his mind recalled a jumbled series of images of Sherlock’s taut neck against the artichoke-coloured leather sofa. His pink fingers in the warm water at the police station. His pale hand bumping John’s hand around his cock… John’s toes curled, and he switched the water to cold. Whatever he wanted (beyond what his body obviously wanted) should wait until they had both slept. And possibly addressed the situation.

At least a bit.

Several minutes later he pulled himself into his old striped dressing gown, towelling off the last of the water and the preceding day. He needed to shave in the morning, but, he thought as he switched off the light with relief, that could wait too.

In the corridor, he found himself staring at Sherlock’s closed door. Ah.

A quick glimpse at the kitchen saw virtually nothing moved, except – John’s mouth quirked in satisfaction – a single dirty knife discarded beside the sink. Sherlock had _eaten_. This boded well both for the night’s rest and tomorrow’s post-case 221b weather forecast. He rinsed the knife, flicked off the light, and mounted the stairs, resisting the urge to whistle.

On the landing outside his door, however, he halted. His bedside lamp was on. Suddenly holding his breath, he crossed his threshold and found Sherlock, in his steel blue pyjamas, propped against John’s headboard, his toes nearly reaching the end of the wide bed. In his hands was a plate with a mostly-eaten sandwich. 

Sherlock was watching him warily. John’s skin itched; he felt more naked now than he had in the shower under the glaring bathroom light. After a moment, he moved round to the far side of the bed, picking up his comb and sitting on the edge of the mattress. Sherlock chomped his sandwich in silence behind him. John tried to reconcile the immediate strangeness that had crept into the room with him and his barely contained giddiness that Sherlock had invited himself into John’s bed.

Clearing his throat, Sherlock muttered, ‘Obviously I don’t have to–’

‘No,’ he cut across, twisting round to look Sherlock in the eyes. ‘It’s… it’s fine.’ He nodded once to confirm this. The corner of Sherlock’s mouth had a small patch of mustard; the blotch on his neck was turning a furious shade of purple. John found himself staring, somehow, at both. He said, blankly, ‘If you got crumbs in my bed, you’ll be the one hoovering, I hope you know.’

Sherlock nodded mutely, though John knew better than to consider this an actual agreement. The plate was now empty, so John plucked it carefully from Sherlock’s hands and placed it beside his comb, feeling the constrictions of his dressing gown as he did so. Hands now free, Sherlock, _clever man_ , reached forward and pulled ineffectually at the tie of the gown.

‘You wanted to talk,’ he breathed, smelling faintly of mustard and ham, a cord-end in each hand, ‘and sleep.’

‘In a bit,’ John suggested into Sherlock’s mouth, before covering it with his. His tongue found the mustard at the corner of Sherlock’s lips and licked it clean (Dijon, the poncy git), a sharp tang of flavour combined with the warm puff of breath as Sherlock found his lip and tugged. Sherlock, it seemed, kissed like he knew what he was doing. John tried not to get lost in this thought by proving he knew, in this more than most things, possibly better. 

Refusing to release his mouth, Sherlock slid his hands with singeing slowness up to John’s neck and then down, fingers slipping beneath his dressing gown to peel it deliberately down his arms. John shivered and leaned further into Sherlock’s body heat, shuffling out of the gown so that it pooled at his waist while his hands dragged up along Sherlock’s shirt to press, forearms to fingertips, along Sherlock’s neck and shoulders. The resulting impatient huff from Sherlock’s nose spiked desire fresh in his stomach.

In an instant they were both scrambling, a tangle of legs, as John was pressed back into his pillows, Sherlock ruthlessly tearing away his robe and shoving it to one side so he could run his palms maddeningly up John’s thighs to curl just above where his own knees were now straddling John’s hipbones, while John kissed and kissed and kissed him as deeply as he could possibly manage while he tried to pull Sherlock out of his clothes.

He felt with dizzying certainty that Sherlock was cataloguing his every movement, hovering over and all around John to take in every ripple of gooseflesh and every aching twitch as Sherlock applied his hands broadly and with determination. As his thumb snagged John’s nipple he cried out; it felt like an electric shock to the tips of his hair.

‘Christ,’ John jumped, and he swiftly moved to repay the gesture, struggling to tug Sherlock’s shirt off. As it popped over his head and ruffled his mess of curls John bent up to lick his right nipple. 

Sherlock hissed tightly. ‘So much for sleep,’ he noted sardonically, and John laughed and replied, carding his fingers at the base of Sherlock’s scalp, ‘I did have a nap,’ and Sherlock pursed his lips before returning to kissing the life out of him.

John’s body was thrumming, singing like the _whurr_ of electricity along train tracks, and he suddenly thought to ask, ‘No more case?’

Sherlock shook his head but, as his mouth was now travelling along John’s unshaven jaw to his collarbone and breastplate to his ribs, said nothing. _Good_ , thought John selfishly, as Sherlock nipped instead at John’s abdomen in a way that went straight to his cock. _All night_.

Just as this dazzling prospect entered his head, Sherlock’s mobile rang. 

John couldn’t help a groan from curling his toes with frustration. 

Breathing into John’s skin, Sherlock didn’t immediately pull his mouth away, though his smooth hands that had been sculpting along John’s sides were balled tensely.

The ringing sounded again.

As though drawn by a string, Sherlock curled backwards and crouched on his heels, looking furiously at his mobile. 

‘Get it,’ said John roughly, sounding drunk, ‘it’s probably Bradstreet or Lestrade at –’ he rolled to peer at his clock, ‘– half past ten at night.’

‘Peterson,’ Sherlock confirmed, staring at his phone as it trilled a third time.

For a moment, John felt a surge of terror jangle beneath his ribcage. He suddenly feared, despite his own words, that if Sherlock left his bed now neither of them would know how to get back to it. Reality and the outside world would reappear and they wouldn’t discuss it, Sherlock would pretend it hadn’t happened and John would laugh it off, and then he would have to go back to living _without_ and – Angrily he clamped down on his spiralling thoughts and remained still. 

The mobile warbled a fourth time and Sherlock’s hand shot out violently to pick it up. ‘ _Yes?_ ’ he spat, crossing one leg to sit more normally by John’s feet. 

John, conscious that his half-hard cock was, like the rest of him, entirely exposed, scooted a little up the bed and placed his hands over himself. Sherlock frowned.

‘When?’ he demanded, his voice like the familiar subterranean rumble of the tube as heard from right here in John’s bed on those quietest London nights. His eyes darted around the room unseeing, then back to John with a dark look. ‘Who reported it?’ A pause. ‘And the assistant says she – I don’t care about a _reward_ , Peterson, but if – yes, _yes, fine_ , tell Bradstreet we’ll come round to see for ourselves in the morning.’ He jabbed the screen before tossing the mobile blindly to land wherever it might on John’s floor. (One of these days one of them was going to break a phone, the way they treated them.) Without preamble he crashed his mouth back into John’s. 

‘Mphlf!’ John managed in surprise, before sinking into the kiss. His heart-rate pounded in his ears as Sherlock’s warm tongue caressed his. ‘T-tomorrow?’ he choked out, as Sherlock pressed his entire body, shins to collar, into contact with John’s; the heat of his skin against John’s already warm skin was _searing_.

‘Burglary,’ Sherlock mouthed hungrily along his jaw, before sliding downward. ‘Nine a.m. at Bow Street.’

‘Oh good, a long lie-in,’ joked John, but he was finding it hard to maintain any kind of deadpan when the dark curls of Sherlock’s forehead were trailing lightly along his chest in exactly the direction inversely proportional to his pulse. As Sherlock’s lips brushed his navel, his glorious Stradivarius hands rubbed small circles into the outsides of John’s thighs. John’s head hit the mattress with a coil of bedsprings.

‘Sh-Sherlock, I don’t think – I –’ he stammered, aware that his dusky pink cock was jutting insistently between them and possibly leaking against Sherlock’s silken pyjama bottoms which were instantly his favourite and least favourite garment on the entire planet. ‘You, it’s not – _Ah_ –’

The sight of Sherlock’s lips rounding around his cock was, he knew with absolute conviction, the second hottest thing he had experienced in living memory, second only to the _feeling_ of Sherlock’s soft-scratchy quicksilver tongue teasing and tasting his prick, inside the heat of Sherlock’s mouth. He shoved his shoulders into the bed and tried to catch his breath. 

‘Fuck, Sherlock, oh fuck,’ he chanted mindlessly, his hands coming to rest on the outsides of Sherlock’s arms and gripping tightly. ‘ _Fuck!_ ’ he added for emphasis, as Sherlock let John’s penis slip almost completely out of his mouth before swallowing him down again.

John’s body was shaking with the semi-conscious effort to drag this out as long as possible, to stretch his own expectations to allow Sherlock to continue sucking him off for, he hoped faintly, at least a decade; but, as Sherlock’s hand at the base of his cock drifted back to press at the skin behind, John sobbed at how close he already was. 

‘Sherlock,’ he tried to say, his voice a disaster, ‘Sherlock, _ah_ , I’m,’ but he didn’t want it to end this way, not tonight, not before he was prepared to return the gesture. He pushed at the top of Sherlock’s shoulder until he drew unbelievably perfectly off with a surreal, obscene _pop_. ‘Fuck,’ he repeated, his nails biting into his own palms through the sheets he was now gripping to keep from touching himself.

‘ _What?_ ’ Sherlock demanded, flummoxed, breathing heavily and looking at John like he’d asked him if he’d like to have Mycroft round for an extended nudist Sunday roast. John could only blink at Sherlock: his mouth was entirely wet and red, including above his lip where his familiar patch of dark faint stubble had begun to appear. 

‘God, you look…’ John’s left hand released the bedsheet and went to Sherlock’s neck to pull him up to John’s mouth. When Sherlock obliged, John wrapped his feet around the backs of Sherlock’s thighs and pushed him forward, sending his cock to grate against John’s through his clothes, making them both gasp. ‘Take those off,’ John instructed or begged, he had no idea which, his mouth too full of the taste of himself plus Sherlock on Sherlock’s tongue, a combination which was strange and unbelievably arousing and new. Sherlock immediately lifted his hips and performed some kind of balancing act John could not process just now, but sighed with relief to see had had the desired result. His own hand wrapped immediately around Sherlock’s unobstructed prick.

‘Oh,’ said Sherlock simply, his nose pressing into John’s cheek as he breathing hitched. John, unsure how long he himself could go on, arranged Sherlock’s low hips forward to force their cocks to slot together, this time hot and skin-tight. When he flailed wildly for his bedside, Sherlock pulled his face back an inch to examine John’s, which began to say, ‘I’ve got –’ before he interrupted, ‘Yes, of course,’ and spread his long arm to rummage in the nightstand until he found the bottle beneath John’s spare notepad.

‘That was organised, you know,’ chided John, breathless, while Sherlock opened the lubricant to squeeze a glob into his palm. 

‘I’d hardly call that organised, John,’ Sherlock rejoined, before dropping his hand to his own cock which was pressed against John’s cock, ‘you don’t even have a system for –’

‘Shut up,’ John keened, thrusting up into Sherlock’s hands. They were breathing raggedly, as the slippery sensation of Sherlock’s hand along them both triggered every nerve. ‘Oh, fuck, just – Sherlock, you,’ his mouth angled upwards and met Sherlock’s as his hips lifted off the bed, and he groaned as Sherlock’s thumb flicked around the head of his cock and brought Sherlock’s cock up to meet his hand and, ‘ _Ah_ ,’ John crashed, ‘Sherlock, Sherlock, _Sherlock_ …’

Several more brutal shifts of his hips, and Sherlock’s release spilled hard onto John’s skin, and he sagged with a grunt to hold his weight on his arms only inches above John.

Their rough breath continued to fill the bedroom as John automatically grabbed a handful of tissues and scrubbed away what he could, allowing Sherlock to shift onto his side, the sharp bone of his shoulder sticking familiarly into John’s. 

Eventually John yawned, to which Sherlock audibly rolled his eyes.

‘I thought you slept,’ he accused softly. 

‘Yeah,’ John replied through a haze, ‘five hours in the last twenty-four. And let’s not forget the panic attack portion of the last hour.’ 

With a sigh, Sherlock sat up, reached, and begrudgingly threw the duvet over them.

John smiled. ‘I knew you could read minds.’

‘Hardly Nietzsche,’ Sherlock said drily. John snorted. He felt too good, too wrung out in the best possible way, to debate the reading level of his own thoughts, or the larger unspoken question of what exactly they were doing, had done, were going to do now. His eyes were already falling shut. He rolled onto his side, facing Sherlock, beneath the covers. 

‘Nine?’ he mumbled into his pillow.

The _click_ of his bedside lamp almost forced him to open his eyes, but the sudden warm shuffling of the body next to him, and presentment of two large feet to glance accidentally off his, made him keep his eyes shut. ‘As early as we consider convenient,’ Sherlock told him in an undertone. ‘There is a substantial reward for returning the jewel.’

At this John did peek one eye open. Sherlock was regarding him innocently, eyebrow raised. John closed his eyes again. ‘Wake me at seven.’

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two things:  
> 1\. THANK YOU, _so much_ to everyone who read, and especially those who Kudosed/bookmarked/commented. I hope you enjoyed reading it even half as much as I _genuinely_ enjoying writing it.  
>  2\. SEQUEL: Yes, this is definitely a series. I waited to post the final chapter to this initial story until I had a few chapters under my belt of its successor. So! Yes! ~~There will be more... --it may be quite some time, as it's shaping up to be a LONG fic, and in need of much editing. And oh-ho, I'm also meant to be working on my masters dissertation. Pft.-- ... eventually.~~ Screw that, [SEQUEL AHOY!](http://archiveofourown.org/works/956731) (And the masters is done too, thanks for asking. :))  
>  x

**Author's Note:**

> All characters and canon/extra-canonical references belong to their original creators. Canon compliant... except where it suited me to do otherwise, as will become abundantly clear. Epigraph from Pablo Neruda's gorgeous '[Ode to Broken Things](http://arabella-strange.tumblr.com/post/58264988829/things-are-being-broken-in-the-house-as-if)'. Any errors, please let me know.
> 
> All comments welcome!


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